> THE COMMUNION BOOK WAS AT EYE LEVEL IN EVERY CHECKOUT LINE AND I WAS SEVEN

So I'm flipping around tonight and land on National Geographic, which I want to say up front is the channel I put on specifically to not get my heart rate up, and it's an alien abduction show. Fine. Talking heads, reenactments with a guy in a bathrobe standing at a window, the usual. And then they put up the cover of Communion and I actually said something out loud in an empty room.

I was seven. This would have been 1987 going into 1988, because the hardcover was early 87 and the paperback came out January 88, and the paperback is the one I'm talking about, because that's the one that lived in the grocery store checkout line.

If you weren't a kid then, here's what you have to understand about how it was set up. The paperback rack at the checkout was at kid height. Not adult browsing height. Kid height. Exactly kid eye level, right next to the gum, which is where they wanted your hands to be, so they put the gum down there on purpose and then somebody stocked that book on the same rack. And you're standing there with your mom and she's putting cans on the belt and digging in her purse for coupons and you have maybe four feet of personal space and there is a gray face with enormous black eyes staring directly at you. Not off to the side. Straight at you. Tiny mouth. No expression you could name. Just looking.

I could not look at it and I could not stop looking at it. I'd look at the gum and the gum was right there under it. I'd look at my shoes. I'd turn around and look at the other register and there was another one over there. I'd look up at my mom's face and she's doing math, she's not thinking about anything, she has no idea.

I got to where I dreaded the grocery store. Genuinely dreaded it. Tuesday night, we're going to get groceries, and I'd have a stomach about it in the car. And you can't explain that to an adult at seven. What are you going to say. There's a book. What about it. It's looking at me.

Found out tonight that the cover is a painting, an actual oil painting on a wooden panel, by a guy named Ted Seth Jacobs, and he did it in his apartment in New York with Strieber sitting right next to him correcting it like a police sketch. I picture it going move the eyes, no, the chin, no, that's the mouth, until Strieber said that's it, that's exactly what I saw. And Jacobs said the thing hung in his apartment about five days while the paint dried and it was scary as hell. Thank you, sir. I appreciate you confirming that a grown man with a career in painting could not live with it for five days and then they printed two million of them and put it at the height of a second grader.

Over two million paperbacks. Number one on the New York Times nonfiction list for 36 weeks. Third bestselling mass market paperback of 1988. So that isn't one store. That's every store in the country for months. There's a whole generation of us who got looked at in the gum aisle.

And nobody put anything on it. No sticker, no nothing. Meanwhile the checkout line in those days was already not a safe place for a kid, you had the tabloids with the screaming headlines about half-bat babies and whoever was dying, and the women's magazines with the sex stuff on the cover in big letters that you could read because you could read now, that was the whole problem with being seven, you could read. But none of that got me like the book did. Tabloids were obviously fake even to a kid. The book said true story on it. I remember that. True story.

I slept with the covers over my head for years and I want to be clear that it wasn't only because of the book, I was already a dark-fearing kid, I had a whole system, no foot off the mattress, door open exactly this much, hall light on. But the book gave the dark a face. Before that the dark was just nothing in particular. After that there was a specific face in it, down to the shape of the chin, because a painter in New York had been corrected detail by detail until it was right.

Anyway the show tonight talks about two books. Communion and Intruders. Budd Hopkins, same year, 1987, the Indiana woman, they made a CBS miniseries out of it in 92 with Richard Crenna. I had never heard of Intruders in my life. Never once. Almost forty years of carrying the other one around and there was a second one the whole time.

Also they made Communion into a movie with Christopher Walken, which I did not know either, and I'm not going to watch it, but I will say that is the correct casting.